Want Coffee? Tea? With 3:15PM, There's No Need to Choose

It's 3:15 in the afternoon, and you're dragging, half unconscious, unable to navigate the Web or anything else. What's the remedy? Why 3:15PM, of course.

Designed for the afternoon slump, 3:15PM blends coffee, tea, milk and sugar in neat little coffee/tea bags that you soak in a mug of hot water. You get the briskness of tea and the surge of coffee, but gently, just enough to keep you going.

This is a Hong Kong drink, and so you won't find it at Peet's or Starbucks (well, one day you might), but you can get it at coffee and tea shops all over the San Gabriel Valley, including the Tea Station and Phoenix chains. And the Hong Kong Supermarket in Monterey Park is one place where you can buy the instant mix.

The producer of 3:15PM is Shih Chen Foods Co. Ltd. of Taichung City, Taiwan. In that country, the preferred drink is milk tea, without coffee. Therefore, along with the coffee blend, Shih Chen makes four varieties of 3:15PM milk tea, which are also available here.

The coffee blend is based on black tea from Sri Lanka, but the company doesn't specify where the coffee comes from. The milk is non-dairy creamer. The sugar is real, but only a little is added, because the Chinese don't like intense sweetness. This means you'll have to get your sugar high somewhere else.